Publicly traded corporations often operate against the public's interest, serving a very limited group of stakeholders. This is counter-intuitive, since the public as a whole owns these corporations through direct investment in the stock-market, as well as indirect investment in mutual, index, and pension funds. Interestingly, the public's role in the proxy voting process, which
allows shareholders to influence their company's direction and decisions, is essentially ignored by individual investors. We
speculate that a prime...